Supernatural -- "Duplicate" Sam gen
Title: Duplicate
Author: wonderfoal
Rating: G
Characters: Sam, John, Dean
Wordcount: ~2700
Warnings: time travel
Summary: Sam goes to 2003 and briefly interacts with his family on a hunt.
Notes: my second attempt at timetravel in this fandom
Date: Monday, January 24, 2011
Sam had never known an actual home, not the kind where he lived in the same place more than a few weeks, not the kind where people there knew him, where he could make plans a few months in advance and still be living there when the time came to honor them. He’d never lived in a place where he knew all the streets, had a routine of which sidewalk to take, knew restaurants and coffee shops well enough to recommend them to people. Sam had never had any of it, not until Stanford. Losing his family meant giving him stability for the first time in his life, and that knowledge had stuck with him long after he’d left it behind.
Sam had never wanted to visit Palo Alto again, not after losing Jessica and his normal life the way he had, but he had to be sure. He had to see with his own eyes before he took off.
It had been six years, and his memory of his class schedule had dimmed, but he remembered calculus first thing Monday morning, remembered all the complaints from his classmates at the brutal schedule and how awful math that early in the morning was. Cruel and unusual punishment, they’d complained.
Sam waited outside the building, doing his best not to look suspicious. In the line of work he was in, blending in was good. Sam was already at a disadvantage considering his height, but he was good at acting casual, at not causing suspected monsters or witnesses to ever think anything was weird about him. He waited at a bus stop, reading through the school newspaper, and watched the sea of students that was about to empty from the building at the end of class.
He had no problem spotting Sam Winchester, twenty years old and so much a kid that it hurt to look at him.
Sam watched him, walking beside Brady - still an unpossessed innocent then - until he disappeared around the corner of the building and left his field of vision. He hadn’t even suspected someone was watching him, his senses dulled in disuse even though he’d only been gone months from his old life.
After the crowd thinned, Sam left his newspaper behind on the bench and made his escape. He’d seen what he came for. When he’d first woken up in 2003, he’d worried that his presence there had harmed the Sam of his past, but those worries could be laid to rest.
His stolen car had a parking violation ticket on the windshield when he found it again, but Sam wasn’t sticking around long enough to let that concern him. He would ditch the car a few towns over and find a new one. There wasn’t any time to waste - he had some hunting to do if he was ever going to get home.
Sam in school had closed his eyes to the supernatural world as tightly as he could. He didn’t want to know about it, didn’t want to think about it.
Sam was kicking himself for it now. Less than an hour from the university, he found a werewolf. He didn’t want to think about how many people he’d let it kill just because he wanted to run away to normal. Not far from there was a vengeful spirit, one easy enough to salt and burn that he could have done it in his sleep. It was hurting people, and meanwhile the only hunter around capable to combat it was asleep in his dorm, studying for math he was never going to use, philosophy that was so far removed from what would be his day-to-day life it was almost funny.
Hunts drew him away from California. In Colorado, he wasted three more spirits, in Oklahoma, a nest of vampires. Mississippi had a coven of witches waiting for him, and in Tennessee a wendigo was lurking around abandoned mines, preying on hikers in a forest. Sam was a good hunter, better now than he had ever been in his life. But he still couldn’t find the angel that had sent him into the past, couldn’t find the only hope he had of getting home.
Angels weren’t on Earth, not many of them anyway. The cherubs were doing their work, but none of them had the power of time travel. The others were lying in wait for the start of the apocalypse, or just grunts who’d been forbidden from going to Earth. Gabriel was around, still playing Trickster, but Sam didn’t know where to find him. He kept an eye on newspapers for anything that would hint at the Trickster’s presence, but it was a longshot.
No, his best bet would be to find the angel that had sent him there. But that was hard when he didn’t know her name, or anything about her. He’d never seen her before, not until she had appeared in front of him and without warning touched his forehead, spiraling him unpleasantly into the past.
Sam was on a salt ‘n’ burn in West Virginia when his path intersected with his past for the first time. He’d been lucky so far, had avoided hunters that knew him, that knew that Sam didn’t look exactly like Sam should.
He was shoveling dirt when he heard footsteps behind him. He paused, listened, and felt his stomach drop. He had lived with Dean Winchester for most of his life; at this point, he had radar that told him when he was nearby. And if it were Dean, then their dad would probably be close. Dean hadn’t started going on his own hunts until later. It was too soon after Sam left for school for them to be separated now.
Sam didn’t miss the cocking of the gun. He knew why his father was so difficult to be friends with. Sam was a stranger and not to be trusted until he knew him better. It was standard John Winchester. Unfortunately, acting overtly suspicious of other hunters did little to endear him to them.
“Hey, Dad, looks like someone beat us to it,” Dean said casually. Sam wasn’t fooled by the friendly tone. There was no way Dean would be allowed to buddy up with some stranger, not with his father standing nearby, ready to shoot anyone who endangered his son. “Did Mrs. Willis shove you down the stairs, too?” he asked.
Sam hadn’t bothered going to the house to visually confirm the spirit. The research led a straight line to this grave in this cemetery. There were enough eyewitness reports to pick her out of the archived newspapers. She was particularly well-known for her expensive taste in jewelry, the same that the ghost had been seen with, so it was a simple job of locating the culprit.
Keeping one hand on the shovel, Sam sighed and turned to face his family. “Hey, Dean.”
“Sammy?!” Dean shouted, hand holding a shotgun falling to his side. He came to his senses a moment later when he realized that the twenty-seven-year-old hunter in front of him was not his twenty-year-old geeky brother. “Who the hell are you?” he snarled and aimed the shotgun at him.
Sam knew that they were packed with rock salt. It would hurt, but it wouldn’t kill him if Dean decided to shoot. More concerning was the .45 John had trained on him.
Sam let go of the shovel and raised his hands slowly. “Whoa,” he said in his best comfort-the-victims voice. “Take it easy. I am Sam.”
“Like hell,” Dean said. Sam could practically see the anger bubbling off him. There was no telling what he was thinking, but Sam could guess that he was worried about his brother, why some stranger - monster? - had his face, even if it was aged seven years.
“I’m from the future,” Sam said in that same calm voice. There was no point in losing his cool.
“Yeah right,” Dean snapped. “You expect us to believe that?”
That was Dean all right, always the skeptic until he was proven wrong. He’d find no help in that corner. His eyes turned to John. “Dad-“
“Don’t call him that.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “You may not believe me, but this has happened to you before, Dad.”
“I think I’d remember my son coming from the future for a chat,” John said dryly.
Sam thanked God that Dean had related the story of his first trip to the past in detail. “Yeah? Then remember the day you bought the Impala.”
John didn’t look impressed. “What about it?”
“She wasn’t your first choice, remember?” Sam asked, coaxing with his voice the memory to the VW and Dean Van Halen championing the Impala to their family. “You were looking at a van before,” he added, just in case he needed a little push.
John’s hand wavered with the gun and ever so slowly, he turned his head to look at Dean.
“Dad?”
John lowered the gun. “What happened, Sam?”
“Dad, are you nuts?” Dean argued. “This isn’t Sam!”
“He’s your brother Dean, like he said, from the future.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Dean huffed and made no move to drop the shotgun. “People don’t travel through time - that’s fantasy, not reality!”
Sam gave Dean his best bitchface and saw with satisfaction Dean’s conviction waver. “Dude, you hunt ghosts and monsters - things most other people think are fiction, and you can’t keep an open mind?” He knew that Dean couldn’t, that it went against his very nature. It was the same way with the angels until they pulled Dean out of Hell. He had to see to believe.
“Let’s say I believe you,” he said, sounding less sure of himself. “What are you doing here?”
Sam sighed. “Someone had a grudge against me, I guess. She just showed up and -bam- now I’m here. Have been for a few weeks.”
“Someone - you mean a witch?”
“No, more powerful than that.”
“Demon?” John questioned.
Sam shook his head. “Look, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He raised a hand to forestall Dean’s protest. “I know you wouldn’t, so leave it alone.”
Dean toed the ground with his boot. “That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
Sam retrieved the shovel and dug another hole into the dirt. “Hunting,” he said succinctly. “If I find the… creature that sent me here, I can find my way home. Until then, I take the job where I find it.”
“You came back,” John said, looking him up and down. “To the family business.”
Sam stilled with his foot on the metal of the shovel. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I did.” There was no denying that Sam was a hunter, not to anyone who knew what to look for. He was big and bulked out compared to his teen years, but that might have happened anyway. The real clue was in the way he moved, the way he carried himself. Sam was a predator, and other predators knew it.
The fact that he was digging up a grave in the middle of the night was completely superfluous.
“Thank God,” Dean said. He looked like a kid at Christmas to hear that his little brother was coming back to them. Sam didn’t have the heart to tell him how awful things were in store for them. It wouldn’t change anything, just cast a gloomy shadow on their lives.
“Give it time,” Sam said eventually. “Stanford won’t work out, and I - Sammy - will get to the point where he won’t want to do anything else.”
Dean was still floating high, but Sam didn’t miss the troubled look in John’s face. Sam knew his dad wanted what was best for him, and a life of hunting wasn’t what he wanted. John had done the best he could in his circumstances, Sam understood that now. Even when they had had their big blow-up the night Sam left for Stanford, his dad had just wanted to keep him safe. If things had been different…
There was no point in going down that road. “You gonna give me a hand, or are you just going to watch?” Sam asked. He eyed the cast on his father’s wrist and then looked to Dean.
“Bitch, bitch,” Dean said good-naturedly. Whatever misgivings he’d had about this Sam seemed to have melted away in the light that his brother wouldn’t stay gone for good. He grabbed a shovel and set to work on the grave.
The two of them made good time. Sam was better than ever at grave-digging, and his strong muscles broke the shovel through the dirt easily. When they were finished, the closed coffin of Mrs. Marian Willis waited for them. Sam cracked the lid open and the skeleton below gazed up at them with empty eye sockets.
John poured the salt and Dean the accelerant, and then Sam lit the match and set her ablaze. As the flames burned, Sam sat on the ground and sipped the water he’d brought with him.
“Hey Dean, get me my caffeine from the car.”
Dean, ever the good soldier, immediately went to retrieve the thermos from the Impala. Sam was left alone with John.
His dad stared at him for a few long seconds and then asked what he must have been wanting to know since he had accepted that Sam was really Sam. “Do we get it?”
Sam nodded jerkily. There was no question what he meant. “Dean does,” he said simply and left it at that. The relief in his father’s eyes was staggering, and once again Sam couldn’t tell them what lay ahead. The angels and demons had a clear agenda and they’d stop at nothing to achieve it. They’d barely beaten the apocalypse last time, and if they changed things... Interfering could only make things worse.
He heard the door shut on the Impala and knew that Dean would be back soon. “Dad,” he said quietly. He might not be able to change things, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t say what he needed to. It would be his last chance to ever do so. “Dad, I understand.”
John looked at him curiously. “Understand what, son?”
A deep breath. “Why you did what you did. Why you raised us like you did. I know this wasn’t what you wanted, and I’m sorry for fighting with you all the time about it. I just wanted you to know… I don’t blame you, and I love you.”
John said nothing. He wasn’t a fool, knew that Sam telling him this now meant that he couldn’t in the future. “Sammy,” he said, throat thick with emotion. “I-“
“Coffee, Dad,” Dean said as he arrived. John took the thermos and drank like he was gulping alcohol instead. “What are we talking about?” he asked with a glance between his dad and his brother.
Sam wouldn’t lie to Dean, not ever again, so he kept silent.
“The next hunt,” John said, because there would always be a next hunt. “I got a tip about a poltergeist in Santa Fe.”
“Great,” Dean said and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. His expression faltered. “You’re coming, right Sammy?”
Sam shook his head. “No. I need to keep looking for my way home.”
“Then we’ll help you.”
“You have a poltergeist to gank.” Sam reminded him. “Besides, don’t get so attached to me. It’ll be a disappointment when you get scrawny Sammy back,” he joked. Which one of the Sams would be the disappointment he couldn’t say.
“Are you sure-“ Dean started, and Sam went in for the kill.
“Dude, I need to get home. I left you in the motel room to get burgers. Dean’s probably flipping his lid.”
Faced with the prospect of being worried for his brother, Dean caved. “All right. If it doesn’t work out, if you can’t find anything, call and we’ll help you.”
There wasn’t much they could do, either Dean or John. But the offer meant a lot to him. It had been a long time since Sam’s Dean had offered to help him like that. Sam smiled at him. “I know it,” he said.
Author: wonderfoal
Rating: G
Characters: Sam, John, Dean
Wordcount: ~2700
Warnings: time travel
Summary: Sam goes to 2003 and briefly interacts with his family on a hunt.
Notes: my second attempt at timetravel in this fandom
Date: Monday, January 24, 2011
Sam had never known an actual home, not the kind where he lived in the same place more than a few weeks, not the kind where people there knew him, where he could make plans a few months in advance and still be living there when the time came to honor them. He’d never lived in a place where he knew all the streets, had a routine of which sidewalk to take, knew restaurants and coffee shops well enough to recommend them to people. Sam had never had any of it, not until Stanford. Losing his family meant giving him stability for the first time in his life, and that knowledge had stuck with him long after he’d left it behind.
Sam had never wanted to visit Palo Alto again, not after losing Jessica and his normal life the way he had, but he had to be sure. He had to see with his own eyes before he took off.
It had been six years, and his memory of his class schedule had dimmed, but he remembered calculus first thing Monday morning, remembered all the complaints from his classmates at the brutal schedule and how awful math that early in the morning was. Cruel and unusual punishment, they’d complained.
Sam waited outside the building, doing his best not to look suspicious. In the line of work he was in, blending in was good. Sam was already at a disadvantage considering his height, but he was good at acting casual, at not causing suspected monsters or witnesses to ever think anything was weird about him. He waited at a bus stop, reading through the school newspaper, and watched the sea of students that was about to empty from the building at the end of class.
He had no problem spotting Sam Winchester, twenty years old and so much a kid that it hurt to look at him.
Sam watched him, walking beside Brady - still an unpossessed innocent then - until he disappeared around the corner of the building and left his field of vision. He hadn’t even suspected someone was watching him, his senses dulled in disuse even though he’d only been gone months from his old life.
After the crowd thinned, Sam left his newspaper behind on the bench and made his escape. He’d seen what he came for. When he’d first woken up in 2003, he’d worried that his presence there had harmed the Sam of his past, but those worries could be laid to rest.
His stolen car had a parking violation ticket on the windshield when he found it again, but Sam wasn’t sticking around long enough to let that concern him. He would ditch the car a few towns over and find a new one. There wasn’t any time to waste - he had some hunting to do if he was ever going to get home.
Sam in school had closed his eyes to the supernatural world as tightly as he could. He didn’t want to know about it, didn’t want to think about it.
Sam was kicking himself for it now. Less than an hour from the university, he found a werewolf. He didn’t want to think about how many people he’d let it kill just because he wanted to run away to normal. Not far from there was a vengeful spirit, one easy enough to salt and burn that he could have done it in his sleep. It was hurting people, and meanwhile the only hunter around capable to combat it was asleep in his dorm, studying for math he was never going to use, philosophy that was so far removed from what would be his day-to-day life it was almost funny.
Hunts drew him away from California. In Colorado, he wasted three more spirits, in Oklahoma, a nest of vampires. Mississippi had a coven of witches waiting for him, and in Tennessee a wendigo was lurking around abandoned mines, preying on hikers in a forest. Sam was a good hunter, better now than he had ever been in his life. But he still couldn’t find the angel that had sent him into the past, couldn’t find the only hope he had of getting home.
Angels weren’t on Earth, not many of them anyway. The cherubs were doing their work, but none of them had the power of time travel. The others were lying in wait for the start of the apocalypse, or just grunts who’d been forbidden from going to Earth. Gabriel was around, still playing Trickster, but Sam didn’t know where to find him. He kept an eye on newspapers for anything that would hint at the Trickster’s presence, but it was a longshot.
No, his best bet would be to find the angel that had sent him there. But that was hard when he didn’t know her name, or anything about her. He’d never seen her before, not until she had appeared in front of him and without warning touched his forehead, spiraling him unpleasantly into the past.
Sam was on a salt ‘n’ burn in West Virginia when his path intersected with his past for the first time. He’d been lucky so far, had avoided hunters that knew him, that knew that Sam didn’t look exactly like Sam should.
He was shoveling dirt when he heard footsteps behind him. He paused, listened, and felt his stomach drop. He had lived with Dean Winchester for most of his life; at this point, he had radar that told him when he was nearby. And if it were Dean, then their dad would probably be close. Dean hadn’t started going on his own hunts until later. It was too soon after Sam left for school for them to be separated now.
Sam didn’t miss the cocking of the gun. He knew why his father was so difficult to be friends with. Sam was a stranger and not to be trusted until he knew him better. It was standard John Winchester. Unfortunately, acting overtly suspicious of other hunters did little to endear him to them.
“Hey, Dad, looks like someone beat us to it,” Dean said casually. Sam wasn’t fooled by the friendly tone. There was no way Dean would be allowed to buddy up with some stranger, not with his father standing nearby, ready to shoot anyone who endangered his son. “Did Mrs. Willis shove you down the stairs, too?” he asked.
Sam hadn’t bothered going to the house to visually confirm the spirit. The research led a straight line to this grave in this cemetery. There were enough eyewitness reports to pick her out of the archived newspapers. She was particularly well-known for her expensive taste in jewelry, the same that the ghost had been seen with, so it was a simple job of locating the culprit.
Keeping one hand on the shovel, Sam sighed and turned to face his family. “Hey, Dean.”
“Sammy?!” Dean shouted, hand holding a shotgun falling to his side. He came to his senses a moment later when he realized that the twenty-seven-year-old hunter in front of him was not his twenty-year-old geeky brother. “Who the hell are you?” he snarled and aimed the shotgun at him.
Sam knew that they were packed with rock salt. It would hurt, but it wouldn’t kill him if Dean decided to shoot. More concerning was the .45 John had trained on him.
Sam let go of the shovel and raised his hands slowly. “Whoa,” he said in his best comfort-the-victims voice. “Take it easy. I am Sam.”
“Like hell,” Dean said. Sam could practically see the anger bubbling off him. There was no telling what he was thinking, but Sam could guess that he was worried about his brother, why some stranger - monster? - had his face, even if it was aged seven years.
“I’m from the future,” Sam said in that same calm voice. There was no point in losing his cool.
“Yeah right,” Dean snapped. “You expect us to believe that?”
That was Dean all right, always the skeptic until he was proven wrong. He’d find no help in that corner. His eyes turned to John. “Dad-“
“Don’t call him that.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “You may not believe me, but this has happened to you before, Dad.”
“I think I’d remember my son coming from the future for a chat,” John said dryly.
Sam thanked God that Dean had related the story of his first trip to the past in detail. “Yeah? Then remember the day you bought the Impala.”
John didn’t look impressed. “What about it?”
“She wasn’t your first choice, remember?” Sam asked, coaxing with his voice the memory to the VW and Dean Van Halen championing the Impala to their family. “You were looking at a van before,” he added, just in case he needed a little push.
John’s hand wavered with the gun and ever so slowly, he turned his head to look at Dean.
“Dad?”
John lowered the gun. “What happened, Sam?”
“Dad, are you nuts?” Dean argued. “This isn’t Sam!”
“He’s your brother Dean, like he said, from the future.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Dean huffed and made no move to drop the shotgun. “People don’t travel through time - that’s fantasy, not reality!”
Sam gave Dean his best bitchface and saw with satisfaction Dean’s conviction waver. “Dude, you hunt ghosts and monsters - things most other people think are fiction, and you can’t keep an open mind?” He knew that Dean couldn’t, that it went against his very nature. It was the same way with the angels until they pulled Dean out of Hell. He had to see to believe.
“Let’s say I believe you,” he said, sounding less sure of himself. “What are you doing here?”
Sam sighed. “Someone had a grudge against me, I guess. She just showed up and -bam- now I’m here. Have been for a few weeks.”
“Someone - you mean a witch?”
“No, more powerful than that.”
“Demon?” John questioned.
Sam shook his head. “Look, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He raised a hand to forestall Dean’s protest. “I know you wouldn’t, so leave it alone.”
Dean toed the ground with his boot. “That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
Sam retrieved the shovel and dug another hole into the dirt. “Hunting,” he said succinctly. “If I find the… creature that sent me here, I can find my way home. Until then, I take the job where I find it.”
“You came back,” John said, looking him up and down. “To the family business.”
Sam stilled with his foot on the metal of the shovel. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I did.” There was no denying that Sam was a hunter, not to anyone who knew what to look for. He was big and bulked out compared to his teen years, but that might have happened anyway. The real clue was in the way he moved, the way he carried himself. Sam was a predator, and other predators knew it.
The fact that he was digging up a grave in the middle of the night was completely superfluous.
“Thank God,” Dean said. He looked like a kid at Christmas to hear that his little brother was coming back to them. Sam didn’t have the heart to tell him how awful things were in store for them. It wouldn’t change anything, just cast a gloomy shadow on their lives.
“Give it time,” Sam said eventually. “Stanford won’t work out, and I - Sammy - will get to the point where he won’t want to do anything else.”
Dean was still floating high, but Sam didn’t miss the troubled look in John’s face. Sam knew his dad wanted what was best for him, and a life of hunting wasn’t what he wanted. John had done the best he could in his circumstances, Sam understood that now. Even when they had had their big blow-up the night Sam left for Stanford, his dad had just wanted to keep him safe. If things had been different…
There was no point in going down that road. “You gonna give me a hand, or are you just going to watch?” Sam asked. He eyed the cast on his father’s wrist and then looked to Dean.
“Bitch, bitch,” Dean said good-naturedly. Whatever misgivings he’d had about this Sam seemed to have melted away in the light that his brother wouldn’t stay gone for good. He grabbed a shovel and set to work on the grave.
The two of them made good time. Sam was better than ever at grave-digging, and his strong muscles broke the shovel through the dirt easily. When they were finished, the closed coffin of Mrs. Marian Willis waited for them. Sam cracked the lid open and the skeleton below gazed up at them with empty eye sockets.
John poured the salt and Dean the accelerant, and then Sam lit the match and set her ablaze. As the flames burned, Sam sat on the ground and sipped the water he’d brought with him.
“Hey Dean, get me my caffeine from the car.”
Dean, ever the good soldier, immediately went to retrieve the thermos from the Impala. Sam was left alone with John.
His dad stared at him for a few long seconds and then asked what he must have been wanting to know since he had accepted that Sam was really Sam. “Do we get it?”
Sam nodded jerkily. There was no question what he meant. “Dean does,” he said simply and left it at that. The relief in his father’s eyes was staggering, and once again Sam couldn’t tell them what lay ahead. The angels and demons had a clear agenda and they’d stop at nothing to achieve it. They’d barely beaten the apocalypse last time, and if they changed things... Interfering could only make things worse.
He heard the door shut on the Impala and knew that Dean would be back soon. “Dad,” he said quietly. He might not be able to change things, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t say what he needed to. It would be his last chance to ever do so. “Dad, I understand.”
John looked at him curiously. “Understand what, son?”
A deep breath. “Why you did what you did. Why you raised us like you did. I know this wasn’t what you wanted, and I’m sorry for fighting with you all the time about it. I just wanted you to know… I don’t blame you, and I love you.”
John said nothing. He wasn’t a fool, knew that Sam telling him this now meant that he couldn’t in the future. “Sammy,” he said, throat thick with emotion. “I-“
“Coffee, Dad,” Dean said as he arrived. John took the thermos and drank like he was gulping alcohol instead. “What are we talking about?” he asked with a glance between his dad and his brother.
Sam wouldn’t lie to Dean, not ever again, so he kept silent.
“The next hunt,” John said, because there would always be a next hunt. “I got a tip about a poltergeist in Santa Fe.”
“Great,” Dean said and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. His expression faltered. “You’re coming, right Sammy?”
Sam shook his head. “No. I need to keep looking for my way home.”
“Then we’ll help you.”
“You have a poltergeist to gank.” Sam reminded him. “Besides, don’t get so attached to me. It’ll be a disappointment when you get scrawny Sammy back,” he joked. Which one of the Sams would be the disappointment he couldn’t say.
“Are you sure-“ Dean started, and Sam went in for the kill.
“Dude, I need to get home. I left you in the motel room to get burgers. Dean’s probably flipping his lid.”
Faced with the prospect of being worried for his brother, Dean caved. “All right. If it doesn’t work out, if you can’t find anything, call and we’ll help you.”
There wasn’t much they could do, either Dean or John. But the offer meant a lot to him. It had been a long time since Sam’s Dean had offered to help him like that. Sam smiled at him. “I know it,” he said.